New English Edition
Artificial Intelligence in Horticulture
Kim Kyung-jin, Attorney at Law
Across five chapters and ten sections, this book examines computer vision for crop diagnosis, harvesting robots and autonomous field systems, smart greenhouses and digital twins, precision irrigation and supply-chain quality control, high-throughput phenotyping, and predictive breeding.
New English Edition
Artificial Intelligence in Food Crop Agriculture
Kim Kyung-jin, Attorney at Law
Across six chapters and eighteen sections, the book examines digital agricultural infrastructure, remote sensing, crop diagnosis, yield forecasting, precision irrigation, genomics, molecular breeding, agricultural robotics, climate-smart agriculture, and global food security.
New English Edition
The Future of Forestry and Agroforestry
Kim Kyung-jin, Attorney at Law
Driven by Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation
Across five chapters and fifteen sections, the book follows satellites, drones, LiDAR, digital twins, forest-specific language models, wildfire and pest forecasting, forestry robotics, agroforestry, timber traceability, and forest carbon markets.
New English Edition
Smart Livestock Farming: AI Enters the Barn
Kim Kyung-jin, Attorney at Law
Sensors listen, cameras watch, and artificial intelligence helps farmers decide.
Across five chapters and fifteen sections, the book follows precision livestock farming from animal health and reproduction to robotic milking, virtual fencing, digital twins, methane reduction, welfare, and data ownership.
Table of Contents
Han Dong-hoon, Busan Buk-gu Gap: A Record of the 100 Days Before and After the Election (Mar. 26-Jul. 3, 2026)
Kim Kyung-jin
Table of Contents and 13 sections
From March 26 to July 3, 2026, this record follows the spring after expulsion, the Busan Buk-gu Gap by-election, victory as an independent, and the first bill submitted in the National Assembly.
Table of Contents
Artificial Intelligence and Medicine
Kim Kyung-jin, Attorney at Law
AI in clinical care, hospitals, education, and research
AI in medical imaging, risk prediction, treatment planning, hospital operations, education, and research, with patient safety, privacy, and accountability.
[AI Library] Chapter 11. The Reality and Promise of Noninvasive BCI
Brain Readers: Neuralink and the Final Human Revolution
Chapter 11. The Reality and Promise of Noninvasive BCI
Kim Kyung-jin
A. Meta's EMG Wristband and Wearable BCI
In 2019, Mark Zuckerberg quietly acquired a startup called CTRL-Labs. Its founder was Thomas Reardon, a computer scientist who had also built Internet Explorer at Microsoft. But Reardon's new obsession wasn't web browsers. It was the wrist.
The acquisition price was estimated between 500 million and 1 billion dollars. Meta never disclosed the exact figure. What they bought wasn't a company. It was an idea: that you could read thoughts without implanting a chip in the brain.
Six years later, in September 2025, that idea became a product. The Meta Neural Band. A band worn on the wrist. It looked like an ordinary smartwatch on the outside. But on the inside, gold-plated electrodes pressed against the skin. Their job was to read the electrical signals of muscles.
The technology is called surface electromyography, or sEMG. The principle is straightforward. When we think about moving a finger, the brain sends a signal through the spinal cord. When that signal reaches the muscles in the wrist,
a faint burst of electrical activity occurs. The Meta Neural Band detects this activity. Before the finger actually moves.
Meta collected data from nearly 200,000 research participants to develop this technology. The result was a universal model, a system that works for most people without individual calibration. Machine learning algorithms analyze the patterns of electrical signals generated at the wrist and predict what the user intends to do. Tap, swipe, pinch. Even writing letters in the air.
On September 30, 2025, the Neural Band launched alongside the Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses. The price was $799. The glasses had a small built-in display, controlled by the wristband. A light rub of the thumb alongside the index finger scrolled the screen. Pinching and releasing made a selection. No need to raise your hand or stare at a screen.
Meta insists this technology is not a brain-computer interface. In a white paper published in January 2025, they drew a clear distinction. sEMG operates on the peripheral nervous system. It does not read brain signals directly. It only detects electrical signals generated when muscles activate. Unlike invasive BCI, no surgery is required, and no information is sent to the brain.
Yet the boundary is blurry. If the intention to move a finger originates in the brain, is there a fundamental difference between reading that intention at the wrist and reading it inside the skull? Meta's technology decodes the brain's commands without directly reading the brain. A kind of detour.
In January 2026, at CES, Meta announced a new partnership with Garmin. It was a proof of concept for using the Neural Band inside a car. A demonstration where a driver controlled the infotainment system through subtle wrist movements alone. Rolling down the window, locking the door, changing the music, all through tiny twitches of the fingers.
There was an even more significant announcement: a research collaboration with the University of Utah. The study focused on patients who struggle to move their hands due to conditions like ALS or muscular dystrophy. The Meta Neural Band could detect even the faintest signals as long as the muscles were not completely paralyzed. A person unable to move their hands controlling a smart speaker, opening blinds, unlocking a door. The same problem Neuralink was trying to solve with a brain implant, Meta was approaching with a wristband.
The band's materials are worth noting. It uses a fiber called Vectran, the same material found in the landing airbags of Mars rovers. Lightweight and durable. The battery lasts 18 hours, and it carries an IPX7 water resistance rating. You can wear it in the shower.
But the question remains. Is this the true beginning of BCI, or is it just a sophisticated gesture recognition device? Meta denies the former and insists on the latter. The trajectory of the technology, though, tells a different story. What starts at the wrist could move to the shoulder, then the neck, and someday to the scalp. Who can guarantee it won't?
B. Neurable: Measuring Focus with EEG Headphones
In 2018, a Boston startup unveiled the world's strangest game. It was a virtual reality arcade game with no controller. Players wore a brainwave sensor on their heads and picked up and threw objects using thought alone. The company behind the demo was Neurable. Its CEO, Ramses Alcaide, held a PhD in neuroscience.
Six years later, Neurable abandoned gaming. What they chose instead was headphones.
On September 24, 2024, the MW75 Neuro was released. It was a collaboration with Master & Dynamic, a premium audio company. On the outside, it looked like an ordinary pair of wireless headphones. A luxurious design crafted from leather and metal. A 40-millimeter beryllium driver delivered warm, rich sound. It had noise canceling too. The price was $699, about $150 more than the Apple AirPods Max.
The difference was hidden inside the ear cups. Twelve EEG sensors, wrapped in soft fabric, rested against the scalp around the ears. These sensors measured brainwaves. Continuously, while the user listened to music or worked.
What Neurable measures is not the content of thoughts. It is the state of focus. It analyzes the patterns of alpha and beta waves first discovered by Hans Berger in 1924. When we concentrate, brainwaves take a specific shape. When we become distracted, they take another. Neurable's algorithms detect this difference. Inside the company, each algorithm is supposedly named after a Pokemon character.
Open the app and a dashboard appears. It shows how much you focused today, when your concentration dipped, and which hours were most productive. A feature called Cognitive Snapshot takes a two-minute reading and evaluates the current state of your brain. It tells you whether now is the time for complex work or for lighter tasks.
There was also a partnership with the Mayo Clinic. The collaboration aimed to validate a feature called Brain Break. When the headphones detect declining focus, they suggest a rest. The study found that participants preferred resting based on brainwave-driven alerts over resting at fixed intervals. They reported less subjective fatigue as well.
In December 2025, a follow-up product arrived. The MW75 Neuro LT. The price dropped to $499, and the weight fell by 12 percent. Alcaide said in the announcement: "Your brain has been saying something all along. Nobody was listening until now."
In a study of 132 participants, Neurable's EEG headphones distinguished between focus and distraction with roughly 80 percent accuracy. That falls short of medical-grade EEG equipment in precision. But medical equipment takes 30 minutes just to apply gel and attach electrodes to the scalp. Neurable only asks you to put on headphones.
The company's vision is "a Fitbit for the brain." Measuring the quality of focus every day, the same way we count steps. Making cognitive tracking as routine as sleep tracking has already become.
There are limits, of course. EEG signals measured from the scalp around the ears are weak. Compared to placing electrodes on the top of the head, there is less information to work with. Movement and muscle tension create noise. Neurable acknowledges these constraints, but argues that everyday usability matters more than perfect precision.
They may be right. Eighty percent accuracy that you can get every day may be more useful than 100 percent accuracy you get once a year. Just as fitness trackers never replaced medical-grade ECGs, Neurable's headphones won't replace a neurologist's office. But in the vast territory between those two extremes, a new market is opening up.
C. Emotiv: Consumer EEG and the MN8 Earbuds
Tan Le was a Vietnamese refugee. She left Vietnam by boat with her family when she was four years old. She grew up in Australia and graduated from law school. But instead of becoming a lawyer, she chose to study the brain. In 2011, she stood on the TED stage. Wearing a black headset on her head, she moved a cube on a screen using nothing but her thoughts. It was the moment she introduced a company called Emotiv to the world.
Emotiv's first product was a headset called EPOC. A device fitted with 14 electrodes, designed for researchers and developers. The price was a few hundred dollars. At a time when medical-grade EEG equipment cost tens of thousands, this was a revolution. University labs and hobbyist developers could now access brainwave data.
More than a decade has passed since then. Emotiv still exists. But the competition has grown. Neurability released a more refined set of headphones. Meta pivoted to the wrist. Emotiv's answer was the ear.
MN8. The company claims it is the world's smallest EEG device. It looks like an ordinary pair of Bluetooth earbuds. Put them in your ears and you can listen to music, take phone calls. But hidden inside each earbud is a two-channel EEG sensor. It measures brainwaves from inside the ear canal.
The channel count is low. Compared to Neurability's 12 channels, it is one-sixth. But according to Emotiv, the position inside the ear canal provides a more stable signal. There is less noise from movement, and skin contact is more consistent than on the surface of the scalp.
The price is $399, a little over half the cost of Neurability's headphones. Battery life lasts six hours. Because it uses dry electrodes, no gel or water is needed. Setup takes less than a minute.
The market Emotiv is targeting is not individual consumers. It is corporations. On their website, the phrase "workplace wellness, safety, and productivity" stands out. The MN8 is designed to monitor employees' stress levels and focus.
A partnership with JLL, a global real estate services company, illustrates the use case. JLL used the MN8 to measure how employees responded to various collaboration tools and work environments. Which meeting room layouts improved focus. Which software increased cognitive load. An era where brainwave data reshapes office design.
Detecting drowsiness in truck drivers is another possible application. So is monitoring the alertness of air traffic controllers. Emotiv's machine learning models have been trained on brainwave data accumulated over more than a decade. The vast database collected from earlier-generation 14-channel headsets improves the accuracy of the two-channel earbuds.
But this technology casts a shadow. The criticism of "bossware" follows it everywhere. The argument: it is a tool for employers to surveil employees' brains. If your boss can tell whether you drifted off during a meeting, whether your concentration dipped in the afternoon. Is this a productivity improvement, or an invasion of privacy?
Emotiv states explicitly that its products are not medical devices. A disclaimer on every product page says they are not sold as medical devices under EU Medical Device Directive 93/42/EEC. They say they do not read thoughts or emotions. They only provide feedback on levels of stress and distraction.
The boundary is blurry. What is the difference between measuring stress levels and reading emotions? How far is the distance between monitoring focus and surveilling thoughts?
Tan Le said neurotech would become the next trend in wearable technology. She may be right. The question is who will lead that trend, for what purpose, and under what rules.
D. Big Tech Enters the Arena: Apple's AirPods Brainwave Patent and Samsung's Hearables
In January 2023, Apple quietly filed a patent. The document, published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office that July, was titled "Biosignal Sensing Device Using Dynamic Selection of Electrodes." Patent number US20230225659A1.
The document was packed with technical detail. An earbud-shaped device. Multiple electrodes distributed across the tip and housing. A system capable of measuring electroencephalography (EEG), electromyography (EMG), electrooculography (EOG), electrocardiography (ECG), galvanic skin response (GSR), and blood volume pulse (BVP). An AI-driven method that automatically selects the optimal electrode combination based on the shape of each user's ear.
There is a reason Apple's approach is interesting. Ear shapes differ from person to person. The size of the ear canal, the form of the auricle, the position of the tragus. Previous in-ear EEG devices required custom fitting. That was expensive, and over time, as the ear's size or shape changed, accuracy dropped.
Apple's solution was to over-engineer. Place more electrodes than necessary. Then let AI analyze impedance, noise levels, skin contact quality, and inter-electrode distance to select the electrodes producing the best signal. Each electrode receives a weight, and multiple signals are combined into a single optimized waveform.
The patent also mentioned use cases. Sleep monitoring. Seizure detection. Stress assessment. A function to start or stop measurements with a tap or squeeze gesture.
In November 2025, Apple's research team published a new machine learning technique called PARS, short for PAirwise Relative Shift. Where previous methods focused on filling small gaps in EEG data, PARS learns the larger structure of brain signals. It is a self-supervised learning technique that trains itself on raw, unlabeled data. It outperformed existing methods on tasks like sleep stage classification and seizure detection.
A patent and a research paper. These are signals that reveal Apple's intentions. But there is no product yet. The AirPods Pro 3 included a photoplethysmography sensor to measure heart rate, but EEG was not included. The distance from a patent filing to a product launch remains unknown.
Samsung is moving in a different direction. In September 2025, the company unveiled a prototype developed in collaboration with Hanyang University's Department of Biomedical Engineering. Called Ear-EEG, the device is worn around the ear, with eight gold electrodes placed in the ear canal and on the auricle.
According to Samsung's presentation, the prototype showed a signal-to-noise ratio 34 percent better than forehead-worn wearables. It lagged behind clinical scalp caps by 11 percent, but for a device you could wear throughout the day, the numbers were striking.
One of the demonstrated features was drowsiness detection: real-time alerts for drivers falling asleep at the wheel. Another was more controversial. By applying an AI model, the system predicted participants' video preferences with 92.86 percent accuracy. Neuromarketing. Technology that uses brainwaves to determine which videos you like.
At CES in January 2026, Samsung went a step further. The company announced a feature called "Brain Health." A service that analyzes data from the Galaxy Watch and Galaxy Ring to detect changes in cognitive function. The goal is to identify early signs of dementia by tracking voice patterns, gait, and sleep habits.
Pravin Raja, Vice President of Samsung's Digital Health division, said the technology was not intended to replace doctors. Its purpose, he said, was to catch warning signs early and recommend timely medical consultation. Data is protected by Samsung Knox security and processed on-device, not in the cloud.
The Ear-EEG prototype has not been released yet. It is larger than the current Galaxy Buds 3 Pro, and the design is still unpolished. But Samsung's roadmap seems clear. Leaked information suggests EEG functionality could be integrated into the Galaxy Buds 4 Pro by 2027.
What does the entry of these two giants tell us? The ear is becoming a window into the brain. Trillion-dollar companies are moving into territory that startups like Neurability, Emotiv, and NextSense pioneered.
Regulation, though, can't keep up with the technology. In 2024, Colorado became the first U.S. state to pass a neural data protection law, but most countries and regions still have no such legislation. Who owns your brainwave data? Is a record of the hours you couldn't focus a piece of medical information, consumer data, or a workplace performance metric?
The earbuds keep shrinking, the sensors grow more sensitive, and the algorithms get smarter. But the question we should be asking isn't about what the technology can do; it's about where the technology is headed. When a small device tucked into your ear can read your most private territory, the impulses before thought, the reactions before awareness, the preferences never put into words, will we call that convenience, or will we call it intrusion?
There is no answer yet. Perhaps the answer depends not on the technology itself but on the institutions and agreements we choose to build.
Kim Kyung-jin
Attorney · Former Member of the National Assembly · AI Policy Researcher
© 2026 Kim Kyung-jin. All rights reserved.